Paid Search

When we set-up, maintain and optimize search and display campaigns for our clients, there is one metric that we focus on: Cost Per Lead. Everything else, your click-through rate, quality score, impressions, clicks, pretty much every other metric in our report helps us analyze the best way to improve the Cost Per Lead.

While paid search doesn’t work for all businesses, it’s particularly good for home services because there’s always something wrong in people’s homes and they need help, ASAP. So if you own a business that services homeowners, here’s why you need to be using paid search:

I used to feel sorry for branding marketers. They do all this beautiful work yet there’s no way to definitively prove it leads to any conversions. (Note– we are calling leads and sales conversions.) Meanwhile, in my digital wheelhouse, I would smugly think, “Well, I can prove that our campaigns deliver. Analytics, Baby! Look at these purty conversions!

When you set-up paid search campaigns with Google, Bing, and others, there’s a section during the set-up process which asks you how you want to run your ads. For Google, you’re given the choice between four options:

Around this time every year gyms get increasingly busier. At lunch time, instead of there being the 10 other people with me, there always seems to be 100 more, though it only tends to last a few weeks, you can see that people are trying to make some changes in the new year. Consider doing the same thing with your campaigns in AdWords, Bing, and Facebook.

Reach Your Customers and Prospects through Google Search The latest advancement for Advertisers that work with Google is a new product called “Customer Match.” Facebook advertisers would recognize this as a “Custom Audience.” Essentially, advertisers can now upload a list of email addresses in to AdWords to build a custom audience. When those individuals are signed-in to a Google product, advertisers can show them targeted ads about their brand, product, or services as well as upcoming promotions.

How cool is this “new-ish” feature in Google AdWords? We can now set-up mobile specific URLs within the same ad. So a single ad can direct desktop traffic to one URL, and that same ad, when displayed on smartphones, will send mobile traffic to a different, mobile-optimized URL.

Below is a list of keyword terms that the vast majority of advertisers should add to their PPC accounts as negative keywords at the campaign level. Negative keywords stop your ad from showing up on particular searches. For instance, if you fix major appliances in the Boston area, and want to advertise on the term Refrigerator repair in Boston, you would not want to be found when someone searches for Refrigerator repair jobs in Boston. That’s most likely a person searching for a job. To stop your ad from showing on that term, you can ad jobs as a negative keyword match.

Why aren’t Google Forwarding Numbers Showing in My Ad’s Call Extensions? We recently came across a situation where we set-up call extensions for our client with a Google-forwarding number. However, in testing to make sure it was working, our call extension numbers were not showing up consistently. Here’s the Scenario: We have a client that we recently launched. As part of the launch we set-up call extensions in Google AdWords. They were set-up at the campaign level and we enabled the Google Forwarding number to track conversions from ads. The forwarding number allows Google to replace the client’s phone number in the ad extension of the ad with a Google provided number. When a searcher either performed a “Mobile Click-to-call” or saw our ad on a SERP and called it, we could see that conversion in AdWords. The call would be forwarded to the predetermined number that we had set-up in our call extension.